Berlin is often described as the site of sexual innovation in both popular and scholarly accounts of the history of sexuality in the twentieth century. Particularly in the inter-war period, the metropolis became an iconic symbol of gender-bending nightlife, an organizational centre for myriad movements of sexual emancipation, and a nexus of scholarly efforts to catalogue and understand human sexual comportment and identity. This chapter argues, however, that while there was certainly an explosion of public, literary, and medical interest in sex, sexuality, and sexual identity in early twentieth-century Berlin, the terms ‘invention’ and ‘discovery’ can oversimplify what was actually a very complex and contentious historical process. Focusing on a few examples of the divisions within queer communities – particularly the conflicts between feminist, lesbian, and transgender activists and the arguments emanating from the masculinist branch of the gay rights movement – it tracks how discourses about the morality of prostitution, the social impact of same-sex love, and racialized biological knowledge shaped definitions of citizenship in ways that still resonate and are still debated. It is this debate, rather than some kind of definitive invention of sexual identity, that makes this period relevant for our present.

Reproduction was a matter of extreme importance to Nazi and Soviet leaders, and for this reason alone their reproductive policies merit close scholarly attention. But Nazi and Soviet attempts to manage reproduction are also significant in what they reveal about their leaders' respective visions of how to transform populations and shape societies. As was true of governments throughout interwar Europe, the Nazi and Soviet regimes assumed that the state could and should regulate reproduction. Particularly given the need for a large population in an age of mass warfare, virtually every country in Europe enacted pronatalist policies. But within this common rubric of state management of reproduction, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union pursued very different reproductive policies – policies that reflected stark ideological, structural, and disciplinary differences between the two countries. Each regime sought to transform society, reshape social bonds, and rewrite the social contract along fundamentally illiberal yet modernist lines. Individual liberties were rejected in favor of two quite different collectivist projects: the establishment of a racially defined Volksgemeinschaft to provide social support for the hegemony of the “Aryan” master race over Europe and the world and the much more universalist project of creating a classless, socialist society to serve as the model for the emancipation of humanity as a whole. Both of these agendas called for individual citizens to view reproductive and sexual choices in terms of service to the state.